I recently came across a printout from about three years ago. After the 2018 election, in which Ohio Democrats’ paltry success seemed unacceptable when even Kansas was electing a Democratic governor, I spent several months trying to organize some kind of response. Ultimately I got about 15 Cleveland-area activist leaders to co-sign a letter demanding answers from the state party, and finally badgered the executive director into a meeting with us.
Views were exchanged and not much resulted beyond that, which doesn’t at all surprise me, now. I have accepted that Americans and our culture take the very ordinary human tendency, to maintain the same approach come what may, to an extreme of hypernormalization. I’m still glad that I tried to do something more; I think it’s one thing to dismiss the system as garbage and to drop out, and another thing to step up first and engage others in an organized effort to test the system’s responsiveness.
Meanwhile, this seems worth entering into the record, here, not because the Ohio Democratic Party is singularly deserving of a kicking but, to the contrary, because so much of this seems applicable to the entire project of American liberal democracy.
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